Raumplan versus Plan Libre
Bibliotheek TU Delft
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Raumplan versus Plan Libre
Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, 1919 -1930
edited by
Max Risselada
with contributions by
Beatriz Colomina
Stanislaus von Moos
Johan van de Beek
Arjan Hebly
Published and distributed by:
Delft University PressStevinweg 1 2628 CN Delft The Netherlands Telefoon (0)15-783254
CIP-gegevens Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag
RaumplanRaumplan versus Plan Libre / ed.: M. Risselada;
[transl. from the Dutch]. - Delft : Delftse Universitaire Pers. - 111. Oorspr. uitg.: Delft: Delftse Universitaire Pers, 1987. Met lit. opg. ISBN 90-6275-481-3
SISO 715.8 UDC 72.01 "19" NUGI 923 Trefw.: bouwkunst; geschiedenis; 20e eeuw / Loos, Adolf / Le Corbusier
Copyright© 1988 by the authors Teksten en afbeeldingen Le Corbusier:
Copyright © 1988 by Le Corbusier, c/o BEELDRECHT, Amsterdam All rights reserved. Published 1987. Revised edition 1988.
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Delft University Press.
I I I
Contents
Introduction Max Risse/ada Chronology
Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos Stanis/aus van Maas
Adolf Loos - patterns of town houses Johan van de Beek
The 5 Points and form Arjan Heb/y
Free Plan versus Free Facade
Villa Savoye and Villa Baizeau revisited Max Risse/ada
On Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann:
Architecture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Beatriz C%mina
Documentation of 16 houses Max Risse/ada
Adolf Loos:
Le Corbusier:
Documentation of the models Two houses: a closer look
Strasser House - Vienna Villa Stross - Vienna Villa Moissi -Venice Rufer House - Vienna Tzara House - Paris Moller House - Vienna "Dice House" Müller House - Prague Bojko House - Vienna The Last House - Prague
Maison Domino and Maison Citrohan Villa La Roche-Jeanneret - Paris Villa Meyer - Paris
Maison Cook - Paris Villa Stein-de Monzie - Paris Villa Savoye -Poissy Villa Baizeau - Carthage
Villa Stein-de Monzie and the Moller House T exts by Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier
Adolf Loos: The principle of cladding
Regarding economy Le Corbusier: The decorative art of today
Twentieth century building and twentieth century living
6 9 17
27
47
55 6578
98
119 125 135"When we find a hili in the woods, six feet long and three feet wide, shovelled up into the form of a pyramid, we become serious, and something inside us says: Somebody ls burried here. That is architecture" .
Adolf Loos, "Architecture", Vienna 1910
')Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light".
Le Corbus'ier, Towards a New Architecture, Paris 1923.
6
Introduction
A number of factors have contributed to the exhibition Raumplan versus Plan Libre.
Firstly, the fact that both the exhibition and the accom-. panying publication were developed within an educational institute: the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology, Holland.
The comparison is one of the means through which design can be discussed, of vital importance in a situation in which an educational program can no longer be built up around one, all-encompassing architectural theory. This not only as the result of the size of the institution, but also due to the lack of such a theory within the discipline itself.
Consequently, the architectural student finds himself faced with a multitude of views concerning design, and just as many products of those views, both within and without the educational situation. This is neither good nor bad, for it is the result of the increased division of labour and special-ization, within the building process itself. For a long time now, the architect has not been in charge of the entire process; his specific knowledge and skilIs are employed in the preparation of the "project". It is within th is context that the other aspects of the process confront one another:
brief, site and budget on the one side; material, construc-tion and producconstruc-tion on the other hand. This provides an indication of the poles between which the designing pro-cess takes place. These poles are not linear, but critical. There is continual interaction between them, the designer considers the ways in which they influence one another, takes particular stands, makes choices. The boundaries of design are thus continually redefined consequent on the views which architects develop concerning their role as intermediary; views, that is to say, as to which aspect of the building process they choose to commit themselves. One may consider, for example, the architect who conceives of the project as an autonomous piece of work, as opposed to the architect who deliberately "turns himself over to" the building process. The comparison between Loos and Le Corbusier is fascinating in that, in the work of both archi-tects, there exists a creative tension between these two attitudes.
On the one hand the work of both is concerned with the autonomy of architectural means; on the other hand both try, each in his own way, to place his work in a social context, something which each makes particulary clear in
his writing. .
For Loos, the point of departure is the practice of tradi-tional methods, the task being socially determined. The correct formulation for this is geared to a reconsideration of the discipline of craftmanship.
ti " " " ' " . " " ' " '
In Le Corbusier's case the division between the design and its actual realization becomes a fact. In the design itself the new task and the ways and means of realizing it are formulated in terms of new technologies.
The work of Adolf Loos (1870-1933) was retrieved from obscurity, at the beginning of the sixties, by Michiel Polak and Pjotr Gonggrijp, both students at that time. They gave to Loos, and his work, a central position in their exhibition Autonomous Architecture (Delft, 1962), beside Boullée, Ledoux, Schinkel and Van Doesburg: all architects who did not appear in the canon of the New Architecture, unlike those who, at that time, had been introduced to Delft by its exponents.
But it was not only that Loos was rediscovered in Delft within the framework of a critical revaluation of the avant-garde of the twenties. That same period also saw the appearance of the study of Loos by Münz and Kunstier (Vienna, 1964), and an issue of Casa Bella devoted to Loos (1959, Vol. 30, no. 233) with an introduction by Aldo Rossi; some thirty years after the first and only monograph on Loos' work by his assistent Heinrich Kulka. (H. Kulka, Adolf Loos: Oas Werk des Architekten, Vienna 1931).
The pioneering work of Gonggrijp and Polak was further developed in the following years, when emphasis was laid especially on the development of the Raumplan concept and its tectonic realisation in houses and housing-schemes. The essay by Johan van de Beek, included in this catalogue, was written in the spirit of these studies, which do not not regard the pronounced difference between the interior and the exterior of Loos' houses as a split between the individual and the social, but rather as two complemen-tary, architectural statements. .
For many generations already access to the work of Le Corbusier (1887-1965) has been furthered by the publica-tion of his projects in the eight volumes of the Collected Work, published during his lifetime, selected and provided with commentary by Le Corbusier himself.
A new impulse for the study and interpretation of this work occurred when the archives of the Fondation Le Cor-bus ier in Paris we re opened to the public. The archives contain most of the material which Le Corbusier and his colleagues had produced over the years.
This makes it feasible to try to reconstruct the design process, so that the conceptuallevel in Le Corbusier's work - so very much in evidence in his publications - may be related to the laborious practice of actual design.
Within this framework another study was conducted, in Delft, concerning the designing process of the experimen-tal villas of the twenties, which resulted in the exhibition Le Corbusier - Pierre Jeanneret, Designs for the Dwelling,
1919-1930 (Delft, 1980).
As with the work of such researchers as Tim Benton and Bruno Reichlin, this study can also be seen as an implicit commentary on the ways in which the analysis of Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzki, which was conducted in the fifties ("Transparency: Liberal and Phenomenal", published in Perspecta no. 8, 19), was later used at the beginning of the seventies, to legitimize further development of Le Corbu-sier's formal experiments of the twenties. The essays by Arjan Hebly and Max Risselada here elaborate upon the themes of th is study.
Although a confrontation bet ween the work of Loos and Le Corbusier is an obvious one in retrospect, it is remark-able how little, until now, has been published on the sub-ject. Worth mentioning are the observations made by Julius Posener, in the thirties, and an article by Henry R. Hitchcock ("Houses by Two Moderns" in The Arts, Brooklyn, vol. 16, no. 1, 1929/30). The relations between Loos and Le Corbu-sier are also discussed in the critical studies by P. Reyner Banham (Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Lon-don, 1960, "Adolf Loos and the Problem of Ornament"), and Kenneth Frampton (Modern Architecture: a Critical His-tory, London 1980, "Adolf Loos and the Crisis of Culture, 1896-1931 ").
The essay by Stanislaus van Moos is the first study which discusses, in detail, the possible influence of Loos' written works upon the young entrepreneur Le Corbusier; this study was conducted within the framework of research into the significance of the magazine "L'Esprit Nouveau" to Le Corbusier's work.
The subject is not only topical, because of renewed interest in Vienna circa 1900, and the celebration of Le Corbusier's hundredth birthday in 1987, the point made by Loos in his essay "The Principle of Cladding" (1898) is still with us:
"There are architects who work in a different way. Their imagination doesn't form spaces, but mass. Whatever the mass of walileaves over, are the spaces" .
Removed from its context, this fragment makes a funda-mental difference, which is also a subject of our compari-son. On the one hand the notion that architecture is primari-Iy the designing of space, spaces evoking moods to which material and the various forms of its treatment can con-tribute. On the other hand, that of an architecture which designs constructional entities which demarcate space.
This difference is closely concerned with the way in which space is experienced.
On the one hand spaces in which the entire body can dweil - all the senses being involved; on the other hand spaces where there is perhaps only room for the roaming eye. Spaces for use as opposed to spaces for looking at.
Whether Loos really regarded Le Corbusier as belonging to the latter group of architects is not known; after all, Loos wrote his text 25 years before he could have met Le Corbu-sier in Paris. It has since become clear that Le Corbusier, in the experiments he conducted in the twenties, distanced himself from the anthropocentrism that can be observed in Loos' work. Space and mass are no longer in a hierarchical relationship in his work, but in a reciprocal determination in which the disappearance of a perspectival idea of space caused man too to disappear from the centre, thus calling for a new treatment of objects and space.
A question which follows from the above is the manner in which the experience of architecture is conceivable, or transmittabie, via the media of drawings and photographs. As is already known, Loos refused, until shortly before his death, for his designs to be published; convinced that the essence of Raumplan was not transmittabie through draw-ings and photographs. "I say, however: a good construc-tion, when rendered as an image on a flat surface, makes no impression. I am most proud of the fact that the interiors which I have created are entirely without effect when photo-graphed, and that the inhabitants of my dwelling cannot recognize their own homes in a photographic image'.'.
From the beginning of his career, Le Corbusier was aware of the potentially useful function of publications, in which besides the written word, the photographic images also played an important part. The reception of his work is, therefore, largely determined by the material selected and revised by him for the issues of the Oeuvre Complète.
The essay by Beatriz Colomina concerns the difference . between the two standpoints mentioned above; the
con-frontation, in her case, is between Loos and his contempo-rary Josef Hoffmann.
The fact that we have chosen to present both of these spatial concepts in the three-dimensional form as an exhibi-tion has much to do with the issljes menexhibi-tioned above.
Exhibitions are just as important as descriptions, for the presentation of the built environment as weil as for an insight into how these have come about. By the nature of their spatial possibilities, exhibitions are even more closely related to the objects which they depict.
8
Furthermore, architectural exhibitions are unique in that the objects concerned, the buildings or projects them-selves, are not present. They are visualised with the help of the means available to architects to represent the absent object: floor plans, cross-sections, elevations, sketches, projections, modeis, etc., the same means used in the designing process itself.
In order to broach the multiple, complex character of architecture, our exhibition presents the relevant designs in more than one context:
- In a chronological arrangement of pictures of the houses, publications and associates of Loos and Le Corbusier. - In a documentation which presents the houses in
chrono-logicai order, by means of photographs, plans and sec-tions drawn to the same scale, and models which will provide the missing, three-dimensional component. The Loos models are built to a scale of 1 :50 with one transpar-ent wall affording a view of the section; the Le Corbusier modeis, built to a scale of 1 :100, have removable floors. - In three themes:
1. Programme versus type -the position of the type -concept in both architects' work. Loos' "Dice House" (1928/1929) and Le Corbusier's Maison Citrohan (1919/1927) illustrate the comparison.
2. Construct ion versus cladding; the development of material, texture and colour in the interiors of both architects, seen in relation to the Raumplan and Plan Libre concepts respectively.
3. Design versus execution -the relationship of the two process-functions and their consequences for the design process, illustrated by a comparison of Loos' Moller House (1928) and Le Corbusier's Villa Stein-de Monzie (1928).
The models occupy an important place in the exhibition. They provide the only means of rounding out the two-dimensionality of drawings and photographs.
The models are designed in such a way that the charac-teristics typical of the design can be experienced. This is achieved, on the one hand, by the use of different scales; the smalI, abstract models provï'de insight into the articula-ti on of mass and the organisaarticula-tion of plan and secarticula-tion. The large models - those with interiors executed in colour - make visible the spatial coherence of the components.
Because these mode Is can be taken to pieces, or folded out, it is possible for one to explore every corner of the houses.
The models form, therefore, the true works of art in the exhibition, and are documented as such in this catalogue.
Chronology
A survey of the most important designs for houses, publica -tions and associates of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier bet ween 1919 and 1930.
Haus Steiner Haus Stoessl Haus Horner Haus Scheu
ADOLF LOOS
1870-1933
LE CORBUSIER 1887 -1965
1919
Treatyof Versailles.
Establishment Weimar republic.
EI Lissitzky: Proun ID.
Gropius founds Bauhaus.
Asplund: Villa Snel/man.
HAUS STRASSER
Villa Konstandt.
1920
League of Nations in Geneva.
Harding president U.S.A.
Stravinsky: Pulcinella.
Frank Lloyd Wright: design for a house.
Loos and students on roof of Schwarzwaldschule. Çf.~ "e;'f: """ $ f \-
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1921
Beginning NEP in Sovjet Union.
Satyagraha: Gandhi's peacelul resistance.
Mondriaan: Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue.
J.J.P. Oud: House Kallenbach.
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Le Corbusier and Amadée Ozenlanl. Nature morte au Siphon. HAUS RUFER ADOLF LOOS INS LEERE GESPROCHEN 1897 - 1900
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1922Mussolini's march to Rome.
Discovery ol Tutankhamen's grave.
James Joyce: Ulysses.
Van Doesburg and Van Ees/eren: M/el particulier.
C\J C\J (j) or-CITROHAN 11 VILLA STROSS
Chicago Tribune Tower.
1923
Inflation in Germany and Austria. Schönberg's lirst twelve-tone composition. De Stijl exhibition in Paris.
Mies van der Rohe: project for a brick country house.
1924
Dawes plan to counteract German crisis. Adoll Hitler: Mein Kampl.
Stal in succeeds Lenin. Rietveld: Schröder House.
AdollLoos:
Expresstrain London-Paris-Vienna-Brno-Prague.
Model ol Villa Moissi at Salon d'AutÇ>mne. VILLA MOISSI Villa PIeseh. Editor ol "Wohnungskultur"
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1924I
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Establishment ol Atelier Rue de Sèvres.
1925
Chiang Kai-shek seizes power in China. Revue Nègre with Josephine Baker in Paris. Hitier re·establishes NSDAP.
Schindler: Beach House Dr. Love".
Lecture in Brno.
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VILLA MEYER
1926
First television broadcasts. Alban Berg: Lyrical Suite.
P. Schmitlhenner: Haus Roser.
Loos and Neumann in Paris.
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The Five Points tor a New Architecture.
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First Mickey Mouse cartoon.
Weissenholsiedlung in Stuttgart. Van Doesburg: Aubette in Strasbourg.
Scharoun: House Weissenhofsiedlung.
HAUS TZARA
House lor Josephine Baker.
Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Allred Roth at the atelier Rue de Sèvres. CITAOHAN 111 Weissenhol. 14 1928 Hoover president U.SA Trotskyexiled.
CIAM lounded in La Sarraz.
Buckminster Fuller: Dymaxion House.
HAUS MOllER
Loos and Kulka on terrace ol Moller House.
Charlotte Perriand.
Maison Planeix.
VillA STEIN-DE MONZIE
Apartment lor Hans Brummel.
1929
Wall Street Crash.
Melnikov: Tranvieri Club.
Frank: House in the Wenzgasse.
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(lIJ1930
Occupation of Manchuria by Japan.
Marlène Dietrich in "Die blaue Engel".
Schönberg: Mozes und Aron.
Stam: Villa in Prague.
WÜRFELHAUS HAUS MÜLLER
Apartment for Leo Brummel. Country House Khuner.
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Loos and associates.
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Salon d'Automne.
VILLA BAIZEAU 11 VILLA SAVOYE
DAS LET.ZTE HAUS
Villa Mandrot.
Maison aux Mathes.
Stanislaus van Maas
Le Corbusier and Loos
In 1925, the year of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, Le Corbusier pub-lished L 'Art décoratif d 'aujourd 'hui. It was a book that Rey-ner Banham still dismissed in 1960 as "a polemical work of only local interest" ,1 and which, symptomatically, had to wait until1987 before appearing in English translation.
The basic argument of the book (which was to be illus-trated by the Pavillon de I'Esprit Nouveau at the 1925 Paris exhibition) will seem familiar to anyone with the slightest knowledge of Loos' writings, namely that applied art -the artistic design of utilitarian objects - was an anachronism.
Furthermore, anonymous goods intended for daily use, pro-duced either by hand or by industrial methods, were in the process of making the traditional "arts décoratifs" redun-dant.
Le Corbusier himself presented the book as a selection of objects that are "free of all decoration", as an "apology for what is simply banal, indifferent, or void of artistic
inten-tion. " The who Ie book is an invitation to the eye and spirit
"to take pleasure in the company of such things and
per-haps rebel against the flourish, the stain, the distracting din of colours and ornaments." It was also an invitation "to dismiss a whole mass of artefacts (consumer goods -S.v.M.), some ofwhich are not without merit, to pass over an activity (product design - S.v.M.) that has sometimes been disinterested, sometimes idealistic".
This is clearly a reference to those designers who had influenced the young Corbusier, such as Ruskin, Gallé, Prouvé, Riemerschmid, Guimard, Behrens and many others. The book goes on to ask if the public does not have the right "to disdain the work of so many schools, so many masters, so many pupils, and to think thus of them: 'they are as disagreeable as mosquitoes. (lis sont aussi gênants que des moustiques.)' ,,2
As alternatives to "Applied Art", the illustrations to the chapter from which the quotations above are taken offer a cross-section of the products of a modern, materialist cul-ture, developed on economic precepts. The emblematic American skyscraper that opens the chapter is followed by car bodies, turbines, the ceiling lig hts of an office identified as the "First National Company" in Detroit, assorted bags, cases, wallets and cigarette cases, adental laboratory, office rooms in the City National Bank in Tuscaloosa, USA, men's shoes and spats, briar pipes, straw hats, letter-racks and other office equipment, carafes and glasses (such as one finds in the post-1921 still lifes of Le Corbusier and Ozenfant), and finally the cabin of a luxury liner, a bird-cage,
and a wardrobe-trunk made by the firm Innovation in Paris.
The individual chapters of L 'Art décoratif d'aujourd'hui
appeared in a loose sequence after 1920 as essays in the magazine L 'Esprit Nouveau, the celebrated "revue interna-tionale d'esthetique contemporaine" that Le Corbusier established in 1920, together with Amédée Ozenfant and Paul Dermée. Interestingly, many of the exemplary objects selected by Le Corbusier appeared not only as iIIustrations to his text, but also in the advertisement section, and were made by manufacturers who had advertising contracts with the journal. In order to co-ordinate even more precisely these journalist ic and marketing exhortations to adopt a new style of life, Le Corbusier -the editor responsible for advertising3 -designed some of the displays in question. An example of this collaboration was a whole series of adverts for the wardrobe-trunks manufactured by Innovation, each carrying a senten ce, signed by the architect, on the role of
"Types" and "Standards" in modern industry. (fig. 2) Fol-lowing their appearance in L 'Esprit Nouveau, the Innovation adverts we re then published as a sales brochure, in an edition of 3000 copies.4
Reduced to the simplest terms, L 'Esprit Nouveau might be understood as an attempt to initiate the industrial élite in France into the log ic of their own activity, and to make them realize that there was no need to commission "artistic designs" for their products. The implications in terms of design theory (and disregarding the political implications of this avant-garde response to industry) were explained by Le Corbusier in the article "Pédagogie", published in
L
'Es-prit Nouveau no. 19, in the winter of 1923. As the Bauhaus Week had just come to an end in Wei mar, the article can be regarded as a critique of the Bauhaus. In the article Le Corbusier proposed a Darwinian law of commercial and
industrial standardization, according to which the
develop-ment of standard types for manufactured goods is a pro-cess based on competing private initiatives within the system of manufacture, in which the strongest prosper in the struggle for survival according to the dictates of natural selection, just as in nature itself. The "naturai" context of commerce and industry is described by Le Corbusier as follows: "The art of making something good ( ... ), the good product is developed within the industry by the workers in
successive stages, through continuous, instructive experi-ence with the design processes. The good product comes from a base that throws up elements of quality. It is an illusion to assume that this base can receive and absorb
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'standard type'. The 'standard type' is the perfectly made
product. ( ... ) the 'standard type' is resultant.',5
In other words - to insert a sentence from Adolf Loos, which is concerned with the same problem, namely the
questionability of the artistic design of utilitarian goods
-"Revolutions always comé from below. And 'below' is the
workshop".6
But back to Le Corbusier. The thrust of his argument is
clear. 'Form courses', as taught at the Bauhaus, or, more
generally, the construction of an ideal grammar of form to
be applied to all utilitarian objects, is misconceived. The
logic, the form of a product is not something that can be applied externally, but rather something that - according to
Le Corbusier -derives from the nature of the task and of the
product, as the necessary result of an evolutionary process.
An example is the corner reinforcement of a trunk in an advertisement designed by Le Corbusier for Innovation. (fig. 3) Compare this with an example of "industrial design", the "pull-out electric wall-Iamp" designed at the Bauhaus by K.J. Jucker in 1923, in which the form is not the result of a process of industrial evolution, but of an a priori aesthetic
decision. (fig. 4) It was just this type of deeision that Le
Corbusier questioned in his critiqUe of the Bauhaus teach-ing methods.
In the terminology of the contemporaneous Dada move-ment, the corner reinforcement can be described as a "ready-made", and Le Corbusier's objectivist culture in this period was, in fact, based on "ready mades" like this. One only has to think of the interior of the Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau. (fig. 5) The furnishings were mainly of anonymous manufacture, some chosen by the architect from the ranges of firms like Innovation or Ronéo: firms that would have been weil known to the readers of L 'Esprit Nouveau fromthe advertising pages? The bentwood chairs from the traditional Thonet range are renowned as anonymous
clas-sics. Loos himself, who had been a great admirer of
bent-wood chairs since the time of the Café Museum (1899) and had expressed his preference in print, could not resist noting, however, that Le Corbusier had chosen the wrong
Thonet models for his interiors.8 (He was probably right, for
the armchair that can just be seen in the right foreground is probably the most uncomfortable product in the whole Thonet range.)
Whatever the pavilion was like, there can be no question of an attempt to subject architecture, wall decorations and
fittings to any unified formal concept - in contrast, for exam- 4
18
TAILORS AND OUTFITTERS
GOLDMAN & SALA TSCH K. U. K. HOF_ lIEFERANTEN K. HAYER. HOF. UEFERANTEN KAMMER. LlEFERANTEN St. k.u.k. Hoh!i! dra ~~~r,~Zr~hu,og Joscf l..-W_IE_N....:.,_I....:G....:.R:::..:A:=B.::E....:.N...:2:::..:o._ - ' 6
ple, to Rietveld's contemporaneous Schröder House in Utrecht. With his model apartment, Corbusier must have had a basic concept in mind very similar to that of Loos, when he enthused about the "bürgerliche" house around 1800 (the adverts of Goldmann and Salatsch in Oas Andere
could serve as illustrations) (fig. 6): "In those days one
furnished one's home in the same way as we dress our-selves today. We buy shoes from the cobbler, jacket, trou-sers and waistcoat from the tailor, collars and cuffs from the
shirtmaker, a hat from the hat-maker, and a stick from the
wood-turner. None knows the others, but all the things go
together.' ,9
The arguments advanced in L 'Art décoratif d'aujourd'hui
can be traced back al most point for point to Loos. It would be a Sisyphean task, and one with little sense, to identify every similarity. Taking points at random, however, one might look at Le Corbusier's admiration of English tailoring and of the functional aesthetic of American eities and
indus-try.1O Loos' call of 1898: "The English, the engineers are our
Hellenes,"11 could have served as the motto for Vers une
architecture. Le Corbusier was also interested in leather goods, cases, sports bags, and undecorated but expensive cigarette cases - products belonging to that category of elevated consumption that Loos had admired in the Aus-trian Pavilion at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in
Chicago.12 The role played for Le Corbusier by the
Bau-haus, was taken for Loos by the Wiener Werkstätte: an
example of a well-intentioned but useless attempt to drag "art" into industry.13
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... . _ ... l_-"'''_ -""_,,, ___ ._ ... _M .. ~~_ .... _ -'0 ... _ _ ... ...-... , ...1. Adolt Loos, sketchbook page with the Kai-serjubiläums-Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser
Jubi-lee Memorial Church) and a trunk (1899).
2. Le Corbusier, Innovation advertisement in L 'Esprit Nouveau (1920-25).
3. Le Corbusier, Innovation advertisement in L 'Esprit Nouveau.
4. K.J. Jucker, pull-out electric wall-Iamp (ap-prentice piece at the Bauhaus, 1923) .
5. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, "Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau" at the International Exhibition ot Modern Decorative and Indus-trial Arts, Paris, 1925.
6. Adolt Loos, advertisement tor Goldmann and Salatsch in Das Andere (1903).
~ ______________ ~7 ~ ______________ ~8 7. Page trom L 'Esprit Nouveau. 8. Page trom a "Bauhausbuch".
Or one could compare the typography of Das Andere (1903) with that of L 'Esprit Nouveau. (fig. 7) In both cases the layout is markedly conventional, the type area symme-trical and "Times" the chosen typeface. In both cases the printed image is presented as the summation of centuries of the printer's art -in contrast to the artistic composition of
Ver Sacrum on one hand, or the "Bauhausbücher" (fig. 8)
on the other. 14
Finally, there is the entrepreneurial pragmatism -proba
-bly unique in the history of the classic modern movement
-with which idealist cultural reform and commercial advertis
-ing were combined in L 'Esprit Nouveau. The editors of the Parisian avant-garde journal enlisted Voisin and Delage automobiles, and fitted furniture by Innovation and Ronéo as the cultural infantry of the "new spirit" in the battle of daily life, while Loos, in his journal Das Andere had turned to gentlemen's suits by Goldmann and Salatsch, or golf clubs from the "Sport- und Spielwarenhaus Wilhelm Pohl" in Vien-na. Loos' note at the end of the first number of Das Andere may weil be true: "The firms that have been mentioned with
approval in the editorial section of this paper have neither paid anything nor are they due to pay." One would search
L 'Esprit Nouveau in vain, however, for the self-irony that
inspired Loos to pen the following note: "To avoid abuses, it is requested that persons with demands for money or favours should stop immediately and give themselves up to the authorities.,,15 Nevertheless, no reader can have failed to notice how closely the advertisements in Das Andere correspondend to the magazine's campaign to improve taste.
11.
In view of this chain of far-reaching correspondences bet ween the interests of Loos on one side, and Le Corbu-sier on the other, between Das Andere and L 'Esprit Nou-veau, the obvious conclusion would be that Loos supplied the slightly younger emigré Swiss with the ammunition for his socio-cultural campaign. Loos implied th is himself,
when he once commented that the few good things in Le Corbusier's work had been stolen from Loos.16 This
judge-ment was not without some basis. Indeed, Loos' essay
"Ornament und Verbrechen" (Ornament and Crime) was published in French translation in L 'Esprit Nouveau, no. 2 (1921), together with an editorial foreword in which Loos was praised as a forerunner.
"M. Loos is a one of the pioneers of the new spirit. Around 1900, wh en the enthusiasm for Jugendstil was unstoppa-bie, in the era of lavish decor, with art bursting into every sphere of life, M. Loos began ( ... ) his campaign against the excesses of these tendencies.
As one of the first to foresee the magnitude of industry and its importance for aesthetics, he began to proclaim certain truths, which today seem neither revolutionary nor paradoxical.' ,
Just ten years after this editorial "chapeau" (probably written by Ozenfant), Corbusier himself summed up the case of Loos even more concisely: "Loos swept under our feet, it was a Homeric cleansing - exact, philosophical and logica/. With it, Loos influenced our architectural destiny. ,,17
How can one explain Le Corbusier's enthusiastic interest in the ideas of the Viennese architect? He clearly recog-nized Loos as a like-minded spirit. But one should not be misled by the preamble in L 'Esprit Nouveau. To look for the origins of Le Corbusier's personal feud with the reformist,
arts and crafts impulses of Jugendstil and the Wiener Werk
disre-gard Le Corbusier's own development. For th is conflict would have taken on its own con tours even without the intervention of Loos.
In November 1908 -twelve years before the founding of
L 'Esprit Nouveau and nine years before his definitive move
to Paris - Charles Edouard Jeanneret (who was later to adopt the name Le Corbusier) wrote a letter from Paris to his teacher in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Charles L'Eplattenier. In it, Jeanneret admitted: "Today the childish dreams have been abandoned, these dreams of rapid success, such as one or two German schools have enjoyed: Vienna, Darm-stadt."
T 0 understand the significance of th is declamatory ges -ture of independence, one has to know the role that Darm-stadt in particular, and that means Olbrich, had played in the tuition at the Ecole d'Art in La Chaux-de-Fonds. (One should also know that Olbrich was the embodiment of precisely the reformist tendency that Loos denounced so vigorously.) Jeanneret's first works as an architect - such as the Villa Fallet in La Chaux-de-Fonds (1906-07, fig. 9) - were entirely in the Ruskin tradition, and Jeanneret's friends in the "Cours supérieur de décoration" at the Ecole d'Art were still decorating the civic crematorium at La Chaux-de-Fonds under L'Eplattenier's supervision in direct imita-tion of Olbrich's Ernst Ludwig-Haus on the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt. Jeanneret, now with a Parisian perspective, found th is intolerable. "Th is is too simpie, I want to struggle with reality itself. ( ... ) As far as I'm concerned, I say that all th is small-calibre success has come too soon; ruin is immi-nent. You can't build on sand."18
It is true that Jeanneret had spent the previous winter (1907/08) in Vienna with his friend Léon Perrin. Surprising as it may seem, however, there is absolutely no evidence that he knew the name Loos at that time, even by hearsay.19 It would seem that Jeanneret (alias Le Corbusier) first became aware of the author of "Ornament und Verbre
-chen" in 1913.
The first traces of Loos are to be found in an article on "Le renouveau dans I'architecture" in the Revue mensuelle de
/'oeuvre, the journalof the Westschweizer section of the
Swiss Werkbund, published in Lausanne. The following passage speaks for itself: "Have we thus become savages once again after twenty centuries of civilization? Have we re-adopted the mania for tattooing?"20
In conclusion, Jeanneret also quoted the following passage without, however, giving the source: "May I take you to the shore of a mountain lake? The sky is blue and a deep sense
20
of peace lies over everything. The mountains and clouds are reflected in the lake, as are the houses, farms and chapels. Standing there, they do not seem to be built by human hand. They seem to have come from God's work-shop, like the mountains and trees, the clouds and the blue sky. Everything breathes beauty and calm ... "
Why this long, unidentified quotation from Loos? (It comes, of course, from Loos' essay "Architektur", 1910, which Jeanneret knew in the French translation that appeared in Paris in 1913.)21 In this passage Loos appears to develop a theme that Jeanneret would have already known from Alex-andre Cingria's Les Entretiens de la Villa du Rouet (1908). Summarized briefly, Cingria's belletristic book employs a series of dialogues to make a plea for the cultural autonomy of French-speaking Western Switzerland. Arguing that the
"Romandie" has a mediterranean character, Cingria
pro-posed that it should be "De-Germanized": "Notre ame classique, en effet, ne peut qu'évoluer dans une formule gréco-Iatine.' ,22
It by no means a minor detail, that Jeanneret was in foreign parts at the time when he was immersed in this West Swiss devotional tract: he was in Neu-Babelsberg near Berlin, working in the office of Peter Behrens. It was Behrens's example -paradoxically - that proved a decisive factor in Jeanneret's subsequent attempts to " de-German-ize" the architecture of his Jurassic homeland and to lead it back to the "formule gréco-Iatine" .23
But to return to Cingria's book, which contains the follow-ing passage: " ... Ia montagne appelIe
à
ses flan cs des architectures régulières et calmes qui la reposent du désordre inférieur des ses bases. Et c'est pourquoi les vallées alpestres devraient être décorées de longues colon -nades, d'hypogées tranquilles et puissants, de bas-reliefs taillés dans Ie roc, avec une facture géométrique et gran-diose."24Le Corbusier's villas for factory-owners in the Jura - I iIIustrate the Villa Favre-Jacot in Le Locle (1913-14, fig. 10)-reflect this programme right down to the details. In this context it would seem al most inevitable, that Le Corbusier would have been interested in Loos' picture of Alpine archi-tectural culture. Perhaps he failed to notice that Loos had something quite different in mind than the Behrens-inspired Classici sm that the young Swiss was producing at the time.
Indeed, closer inspection shows that Loos was opposed to the sort of reform initiatives proposed by the Werkbund, for which Jeanneret was so keen to en list his support. The
WHI'"
passage from Loos' "Architektur" quoted above, con-tinues: "What's that there? A dissonance in this peace. Like an unnecessary shriek. Down among the houses of the peasants, which are built not by them but by God, stands a villa. The creation of a good or bad architect? I don't know. I only know that the peace, calm and beauty are de-stroyed. ,,25
At th is point we should also look at the furniture and inte-riors designed by Jeanneret around 1912-14. They docu-ment particularly clearly his rejection of Jugendstil and Se-cessionism, a rejection which was certainly influenced by contemporary German developments. The key figure here was not Loos, however, but Paul Mebes, whose book Urn
1800 led a whole generation of designers out of the
dead-end of Jugdead-endstil. Jeanneret, for example, in his many designs for furniture and interiors, referred directly to Louis XVI and the Directoire. While there are many in stances of Jeanneret making direct copies of old pieces, he also tried sometimes to stylize ,his Classici st models in a spirit of the highest "sobriété". Arthur Rüegg does right to compare the collaboration of the Jurassic architect and the cabinet-maker Egger, with that of Adolf Loos and the celebrated cabinet-maker Veillich.26
One example that can stand for many: a sketch of the bedroom of the Villa Schwob in La Chaux-de-Fonds (1916),
which I compare with the dining-room in Loos' Strasser apartment (1918-19, fig. 11, 12). I do not want to suggest that Jeanneret advocated the same ideas on interiors as Loos did at that time; his current models - derived from the Biedermeier and Directoire -would probably have been condemned by Loos as a "relapse into the old
style-mon-10 --- ._
9. Charles E. Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Villa Fal-let, La Chaux-de-Fonds (1905-06).
10. Charles E. Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Villa Fave-Jacot, Le Locie, sketch (1912).
gering".27 The only point I would wish to make with the comparison is that both Jeanneret and Loos had already distanced themselves before the First World War from the Jugendstil interior, and had thereby created one of the preconditions for the remarkable convergence of their ideas - ideas which were to be made public in L 'Esprit Nouveau.
111.
Only a few comments by Loos on Le Corbusier have been recorded. This makes the following anecdote by Alfred Roth even more illuminating. Roth was a young assistant to Le Corbusier when he met Loos in Paris in 1928 at the instigation of Kulka. "Teil me, young man," asked Loos, "what Le Corbusier makes his doors out of these days?"
"Out of plywood, of course" answered Roth. "But that's an
enormous advance ( ... )! Only a few years ago he was proposing in his books and articles that doors should, in future, be mass-produced in the factory out of steel and sheet metal. ,,28 Loos was clearly referring to the Ronéo doors, which, like the trunks mentioned above, had been advertised in L 'Esprit Nouveau.29 (fig. 13)
This anecdote touches exactly the point at which Le Corbusier went beyond Loos. In the eyes of Loos - "the stonemason who had learned Latin" - Le Corbusier's attempts to introduce industrial methods into building and his "Appel aux industrieis" were a self-evident function of the architect. Vet the notion of subdividing living-rooms and bed rooms according to the practice of the Pullman Compa-ny, and of fitting them out with the sort of furniture that had
11 been successful in the office context (see the Le Corbusier designed advert for Innovation fitted furniture - fig. 14),
must have seemed as absurd to Loos as the idea of making doors out of metal. Vet Le Corbusier did exactly this at the Villa La Roche (1922), in spite of Roth's contradictory recol -lections. (Loos had apparently forgotten that his former office in Vienna also had a vermillion-painted steel door; a detail that was striking enough to inspire the architect Gus-tave Schleicher, who had visited Loos in 1912, to recall: "That, for me, was the new spirit!,,30
Back to Le Corbusier: "Et n'est-ce pas Ie fondement même de I'architecture contemporaine!" - he asked in connection with the proposed transference of industrial methods and materials to the building sector: "Transférer dans Ie domaine infiniment plus vaste de I'architecture, les acquis d'lnnovation et d'autres producteurs poursuivant Ie même but. ,,31
Finally to architecture. The differences between, say, the Moller House in Vienna by Loos (1928) and the Planeix House in Paris by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret (1927) are immediately evident, and clearly have something to do
12
22
with the industrial methods that Le Corbusier, in contrast to Loos, introduced into the building process. (fig. 15,16) More exactly, it has to do with the architectural images of indus-trial fabrication. These images -the factory-style glazing on the ground floor of the Planeix House, the matchstick-thin supports and the ribbon windows would be unthinkable in a Loos design. Only one aspect of modern ferro-concrete construction was admitted to Loos' vocabulary, and that as earlyas 1910 (in the Scheu House): the flat roof.
Since they share a similar composition, the facades of the two houses are particularly useful examples with which to delineate the mutual limits of the two architects. Both have a central axis (which only in Loos' case corresponds with the entrance door); in both cases a projecting volume is set on the middle axis at the first floor level, topped by some form of loggia. In the Moller House this loggia is only hinted at - in contrast to the Tristan Tzara House (1926-27, fig. 17) - the grandest of all the Loos houses. Another obvious comparison would be with the Villa Stein in Gar-ches, with its odd "benediction loggia".32 (fig. 18)
If it was a question of summarizing in a slmple formula those elements that united the two architects in the inter-national modernist movement around 1925, the link would be their "Classicism" , or perhaps less superficially, a shared rationalist discipline in the manipulation of architec-tural form. Rationality in architecture, of course, is a con
-cept that suggests two fundamentally different con-ceptual realms. Both architects would seem to have been fixated on the idea of comprehending the various fundamental postu
-lates of a "rational" architecture in a detached, creative synthesis that was, at the same time, both audacious and Classicist. For both Loos and Le Corbusier the question could not be framed in terms of "either - or". It was not a choice between either an empirical, positivistic rationalism
that concentrates on the practical alliance of purpose and material, and on the necessity of function - expressed in Loos' case by the primacy of the fittings, utensils und the spatial plan; in Le Corbusier's by standardized objects and the "plan libre" - oran idealist and formalist rationalism that orientates itself around the Euclidean bodies of cube, cone and sphere, and takes axes and "tracés régulateurs" as its compositional basis. Nor was it a choice bet ween Darwin and Schinkel (for Loos), or Viollet-Ie-Duc and Ledoux (for Le Corbusier). Both saw their task as the formulation of tectonic images of these two diverging traditions of archi-tectural rationalism (the "paradox of reason" in Alan Colqu-houn's phrase33) -images invested, almost, with the status of eternal verities.
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~ ________ ·· ______ ~14~ ______________ ~13
To find out how much Le Corbusier knew of the Loosian
"Raumplan" (spatial plan), as realized in exemplary fashion
in the Rufer House in Vienna (1922), would be worthy of
study in its own right. More exactly, it would be worth investigating the degree to which Le Corbusier drew on the
example of Loos in his villa designs of 1922-27, with their
open Rlanning and mainly lateral connections between
rooms.34
The decisive factor, however, is the formative influence
on both Loos' "Raumplan" and Le Corbusier's "plan libre"
of the English country house - an influence that probably reached the two architects quite independently. In the examples cited above this influence is not to be seen in picturesque groupings - the "promenades architecturales"
(Le Corbusier's term) dictated by domestic function are
developed within the context of strongly defined cubic cores. The coordination of internal space and extern al form has a dialectical quality in both designs; architecture is understood as the enclosure of a freely developed interior within an architectural composition conceived in terms of
Classical monumentalism.
The differences separating the two architects can also
15
11. Charles E. Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Villa
Schwob, La Chaux-de-Fonds, study for a
bedroom (1916).
12. Adol! Loos, Strasser Apartment, Vienna,
din-ing-room (1918-19).
13. Le Corbusier, Ronéo advertisement in
L'Es-prit Nouveau.
14. Le Corbusier, Innovation advertisement in
L 'Esprit Nouveau.
15. Adol! Loos, Moller House, Vienna (1928).
16. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Planeix
House, Paris (1927).
be summed Up briefly in two points: firstly Le Corbusier's
(utopian) faith in industry, secondly his opinion that
archi-tecture -in contrast to the production of utilitarian
house-hold goods - belongs to the realm of "art". This conviction
may have played some part in Le Corbusier's decision to
print only "Ornement et crime" in L 'Esprit Nouveau, and not
"Architecture et Ie style moderne", even though it was
announced in an editorial as a forthcoming article.35 Le
Corbusier rejected decoration in the applied arts and, like Loos, placed utilitarian objects outside the sphere of art, in arealm governed by the laws of technical and commercial
evolution. But, in contrast to Loos, he never lost his
convic-tion that architecture was primarily an art form: "But we are told that decoration is necessary to our existence. Let us correct that: art is necessary to us; that is to say, a
disinter-ested passion that exalts us.,,36 And further: " ... to see
things clearly, it is sufficient to separate the satisfaction of
disinterested emotions from that of utilitarian need." And
finally: "To provoke elevated sensations is the prerogative
of proportion, which is a sensed mathematic; it is afforded most particularly by architecture. ,,37
For Le Corbusier, therefore, architecture is and remains a
16
domain of art. Here, in contrast, are Loos' thoughts: "Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the grave and the monument. Everything else, everything that serves a purpose is to be excluded from the realm of art. ,,38
It is a matter of contention, whether Le Corbusier's emo-tional defence of architecture's status as an art was the weakness or the strength of his theoretical system. It was a system that entangled him in contradictions in its attempts to find architectural and technical solutions to the problems of industrialization, aesthetics and mass-culture. These contradictions are beyond the scope of th is essay: they are the contradictions of the modern movement. The theoreti-cal system, however, made it possible for him to express these problems in architectonic metaphors of industrial reality.
Zürich, October 1983
translated by lain Boyd Whyte
24
18
Note.
17. Adolf Loos, Tzara House, Paris (1926-27).
18. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Villa
Stein·De Monzie, Garches (1927).
1. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London,
1960, p. 248. I originally outlined the relationship between Le Corbusier
and Loos in my monograph Le Corbusier. Elemente einer Synthese,
Frauenfeld and Stuttgart, 1968(see pp. 81, 99ft., 110ft. and passim). I am
grateful to Prof. Tilman Buddensieg for giving me the opportunity to
develop and, where necessary, correct these first observations.
2. Le Corbusier, L 'Art décoratif d'aujourd'hui, Paris, 1925, p. 84.
TransIa-tions from The Decorative Art of Today, translated by James Dunnett,
London, 1987, pp. 84-85.
3. For details of Le Corbusier's role as the journal's advertising manager,
see: Stanislaus von Moos, "Standard und Elite. Le Corbusier, die Indus
-trie und der Esprit Nouveau", in Tilman Buddensieg and Henning
Rogge, Die natzliche Kanste, Berlin, 1981, pp. 306-323.
4. Innovation advertisements appeared in the following numbers of L
'Es-pritNouveau: 11, 12, 18, 19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27 and 28. Explicit references to Innovation products in the texts are to be found in numbers
21 and 24. The contract between L 'Esprit Nouveau and Innovation,
signed on 21 September 1923, committed the editors to publish an
article on the firms products in consideration of the adverts that were to
appear in 12 issues, and also to produce the whole series of adverts as a
separate publication, "de manière à constituer un catalogue complet
des agencements 'INNOVATION'." (Archiv Fondation Le Corbusier.)
Innovation was also involved in the furnishing of the Pavillon de L'Esprit
Nouveau in 1925, as were other firms that advertised in the journal (for
example the firm Ronéo). On the collaboration of L 'Esprit Nouveau and
Innovation, see: Luisa Martina Colli, Arte, artegianato e tecnica neJla
poetica di Le Corbusier, Bari, 1982, pp. 47f.; Gladys C. Fabre, "L'Esprit moderne dans la peinture figurative. De I'iconographie moderniste au
modernisme de concept ion ", in Léger et J'esprit moderne, exhibition
catalogue, Paris and Houston, 1982, pp. 81-143.
5. L 'Esprit Nouveau, no. 19 (no pagination). Compare L 'Art décoratif d 'au-jourd'hui, above, note 2, pp. 85f.
6. Adolf Loos, "Schulausstellung der Kunstgewerbeschule", in Die Zeit, 30
november 1897, reprinted in Loos, Ins Leeregesprochen, Vienna, 1981,
pp.23-26.
7. On the interior of the Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau, see: Arthur ROegg,
"Anmerkungen zum 'Equipment de I'habitation' und zur 'Polychromie
intérieure' bei Le Corbusier", in Le Corbusier. La ricerca paziente, exhi
-bit ion catalogue, Lugano, 1980, pp. 151-162; and ROegg, "Vom Intérieur
zum Equipement. Ausstellungsbeiträge von Le Corbusier 1925-1935",
Archithese 1,1983, pp. 9-15. Loos, itshould benoted, was weil informed
about Le Corbusier's difficulties in furnishing the Pavillon de L'Esprit
Nouveau, in his capacity as Paris agent of the Vereinigte UP-Werke in
BrOnn, who at that time were carrying out commissions for Le Corbusier;
see: Bernhard Rukschcio and Roland Schachel, AdoJf Loos. Leben und
Werk, Salzburg 1982, p. 308; note 954.
8. Adolf Loos in his obituary for the cabinet-maker Veillich: "Joseph Vei
l-lich", Frankfurter AJlgemeineZeitung, 21 March 1929.
9. Adolf Loos, "Intérieurs", Neue Freie Presse, 5 June 1898, reprinted in Ins
Leere gesprochen, above, note 6, 68-74.
10. Le Corbusier first visited the USA in 1935, whereas Loos could draw on
his own, extensive experience of the country. In spite of this - or perhaps
because of this! -American architecture and American industrial forms
provided, right from the outset, the models for Le Corbusier's reforms.
funk-tionelle Stadt. Le Corbusiers Stadtvision -Bedingungen, Motive, Hinter-gründe, Braunschweig, 1978; and Stanislaus von Moos, "Urbanism and
Transcultural Exchanges 1910-1935", in H. Allen Brooks (ed.), Le
Corbu-sier Archive, volume 10, 1983.
11. Adolf Loos, "Glas und Ton", Neue Freie Presse, 26 June 1898, reprinted
in Ins Leere gesprochen, above, note 6, pp. 88-93.
12. See: Adolf Loos, Sllmtliche Schriften, volume 1, Vienna and Munich
1962, pp. 15ff.
13. See also above, note 5. Criticisms of design education, of the Wiener
Werkstätte and the Werkbund are constantly recurring theme in Loos'
writings. The first full major confrontation with the Secession was "Die
geschichte ei nes armen reichen Mannes" (1900), the best known and
most influential was, of course, "Ornament und Verbrechen" (1906).
14. For Loos' views on typography, see his essay "Buchdrucker", Neue
Freie Presse, 23. October 1898, reprinted in Ins Leere gesprochen,
above, note 6, pp. 168ff., and the postscript of 1931: "Von der konstruk
-tivisten bis zur Wiener Werkstätte eine front", Ibid., pp. 206ff. On Le
Corbusier's passionate rejection of Josef Albers' Bauhaus typographie,
see: Gladys C. Fabre, "L'Esprit moderne dans la peinture figurative",
above, note 4, p. 113; illus. 113.
15. Das Andere, no. 1, 1903, p. 11.
16. Alfred Roth, Begegnung mit Pionieren, Basel and Stuttgart, 1973, pp.
197ff.
17. L 'Esprit Nouveau, no. 2, p. 159. The last-quoted passage is taken from
Le Corbusier's essay on "Ornament und Verbrechen", published in
1930 in the Frankfurter AIIgemeine Zeitung, quoted here from Rukschcio
and Schachel, Adolf Loos, above, note 7, p. 278. For further direct
references to Loos, see: Le Corbusier, L 'Art décoratif d 'aujourd 'hui, pp.
85, 137 and passim. The version of "Ornement et crime" published in
L 'Esprit Nouveau was a reprint of the translation commissioned by
Georges Besson, which appeared in Les Cahiers d'aujourd'hui in June
1913; see: Rukschcio and Schachel, AdolfLoos, above, note 7, p. 182.lt
was not by chance that Le Corbusier later dated Loos' famous article
"autour de 1912" in L'art décoratifd'aujourd'hui, above, note 2, p. 137.
The exact details of the personal contacts between Le Corbusier (or Ch.
E. Jeanneret), Ozenfant and Loos are nol the prime concern of this
article. On this subject, see in particular: Rukschcio and Schachel,
above, note 7, pp. 239 and passim; and Elsie Altmann-Loos, Adolf Loos.
Der Mensch, Vienna and Munich, 1968, p. 123. As early as May 1920, when Loos was staying in Paris, Ozenfant and Jeanneret recorded their
"communion d'idées" with Loos, and their "fervent respect" for Loos in
a dedication written in their book Après Ie cubisme, Paris, 1918 (informa
-tion from Arthur ROegg, who owns the copy in ques-tion). This dedication
is illustrated in Hans Bolliger, Katalog 7. Dokumentation Kunst und
Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Zürich, 1980, p. 25. See also below, note 35.
18. Letter of 22 November 1908, in Jean Petit, Le Corbusier lui-même,
Geneva, 1970, pp. 34-36. The influence of Olbrich on the Ecole d'Art at
La Chaux-de-Fonds has hardly been studied. Some notes are to be
found in Stanislaus von Moos, "Kloster, Atelier und Tempel. Anmerkun
-gen zu Charles Eduard Jeanneret", Archithese, 2,1983, pp. 44-48.
19. Alfred Roth, see above, note 16, p. 207, suggests a possible, but
unfounded meeting between Jeanneret and Loos in the winter of
1907-OS, and more recently Prof. René Jullian, speaking at a conference in
Vienna, has suggested that Jeanneret's encounter with Loos' Viennese buildings was one of the great moments in his architecturallife. But Loos is known to have been moving at that time in circles of which Jeanneret
had no knowiedge. It is also striking that Jeanneret does not ment ion
Loos once in the Etude sur Ie mouvement d'art en allemagne, La Chaux
-de-Fonds, 1912, even though Jeanneret had revisited Vienna in 1911.
20. L 'Oeuvre. Organe officiel de la Fédération des Architectes Suisses et de /'Association Suisse Romande de /'Art et de /'Industrie, no. 2,1914, pp. 36ff.
21. "L'architecture et Ie style moderne", in Cahiers d'aujourd'hui, no. 2,
December 1912, pp. 829ft.; the original text is to be found in Adolf Loos,
Sllmtliche Schriften, volume 1, above, note 12, pp. 302-318 (under the
title "Architektur"). The same article was subsequently published in
October 1920 under the title "Art et architecture" , in Action. Cahiers de
philosophie et d'art, which explains why this text was not published in L'Esprit Nouveau (see also below, note 35.) On this question, see also
Colli, Arte, artegianato e tecnica nella poetica di Le Corbusier, above,
note 4, p. 123, who discusses Jeanneret's essay "Le renouveau dans
I'architecture" without identifying the quotation from Loos.
22. On the influence of Cingria's book on Le Corbusier, who annotated his
own copy extensively, see: Paul V. Turner, The Education of Le
Corbu-sier, New Vork, 1977, pp. 83-91.
23. On the villas for factory owners built by Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds
and Le LOcle in the years 1912-14, see: Stanislaus von Moos, Le
Corbu-sier. Elements of a Synthesis, Cam bridge, Mass., 1979, pp. 12-20; and
Jacques Gubler, "Die Kunden von Jeanneret", Archithese, 2,1982, pp.
33-38.
24. Alexandre Cingria, Les Entretiens de la Villa du Rouet, 1908, p. 262.
Jeanneret noted in his marginal comments that he had al ready had similar thoughts during a trip to the Zugspitze - probably in the spring of
1910. See: Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier, above, note 22, p.
86.
25. Adolf Loos, "Architektur", above, note 21.
26. See: Arthur ROegg, "Charles Edouard Jeanneret, architecte conseil
pour toutes les questions de décoration intérieure", Archithese, 2, 1983,
pp.39-43.
27. See: Adolf Loos, "Wohnungsmoden", in Frankfurter AIIgemeine
Zei-tung, 8 December 1907, quoted in Rukschcio and Schachel, Adolf Loos,
above, note 7, p. 110.
28. Alfred Roth, Begegnungen mit Pionieren, above, note 16, pp. 197ff. On
Loos' Paris sojourn, see above, note 17. Loos was actually invited to take
part in the 1914 Salon d'automne, but the exhibition was abandoned at
the out break of war. The invitation was finally taken up in 1920.
29. Ronéo advertisements appeared in the following issues of L 'Esprit
Nou-veau: 24, 25, 26 and 27. Editorial comments on Ronéo products are to be
found in issues 18,19, 22, 23 and 24.
30. Rukschcio and Schachel, Adolf Loos, above, note 7, pp. 1711.
31. Le Corbusier, Almanach d'architecture moderne, Paris, 1925, p. 196.
32. See the detailed commentary in Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier.
Elemente einer Synthese, above, note 1, pp. 81,1091, further developed
in the American edition of the same book, above, note 23, pp. 77-82; and
also Rukschcio and Schachel, Adolf Loos, above, note 7, p. 332.
33. Alan Colquhoun, "Le Corbusier and the Paradox of Reason",
unpub-lished lecture delivered at the TH Delft, 1981.
34. On Loos' importance for the architecture of Purism, see: Kenneth
Frampton, Modern Architecture. A Critical History, London and New
Vork, 1981, pp. 95 and passim.
35. Rukschcio and Schachel, in Adolf Loos, above, note 7, p. 250, ascribe
this omission to a cooling down in the relationship with Loos. In fact
Loos' the journal Action. Cahiers de philosophie et d'art had, in the
meantime, obtained the rights to some original Loos' texts, perhaps
including those intended for L 'Esprit Nouveau. This provoked Ozenfant
to send the following angry note to Jeanneret (Le Corbusier): "Nous
som mes dan une vilaine situation avec ce Loos, car, tandis que nous
reproduisons des articles déjà publiés en français et connus de tous
Puisque vous êtes en relation avec M. Loos et qu'il vous fait des
promesses, je crois qu'iI serait bon que vous lui demandiez de nous faire
parvenir d'urgence un artiele inédit. Cela sauverait notre situation."
Letter of 6 July 1920, FLC boite A2 (15).
36. Le Corbusier, L 'art décoratif d 'aujourd 'hui, above, note 1, p.86, transIa-tion from Dunnett, p. 85.
37. Ibid, p. 87, translation from Dunnett, pp. 85-86.
38. Adolf Loos, Stlmtliche Schriften, vol. 1, above, note 12, pp. 302-318,
quotation taken from p. 315.
Original text "Le Corbusier und Loos" in: Wien und die Architektur des 20
Jahrhunderts, Akten des XXV Internationalen Kongress fOr
Kunstge-schichte, Wien, Bd.8, Wien, 1986, pp.137-150, 207-216.
